The spark for this whole project came from family history: the maker's father-in-law built a similar little robot years ago, and that old figure inspired this new take on the idea. The result is a small humanoid sculpture cobbled together from scrap electronics, and it actually shoots real electrical arcs.
The construction is where it shines. The body is an EPROM chip, specifically an AM27C256 marked 1997 AMD, with a bulb socket for a head and a pair of 16MHz crystals as eyes. The arms are fuses with fuse clips for hands, and coiled copper wire in red insulation runs along them, ending in metal clips. Kneecaps are adjustable caps, the feet are MOSFETs, and the legs are made from two TO-220 package transistors. Everything is soldered together and mounted on a copper-clad base with a toggle switch.
Under the hood sits a high voltage generator module of the same type found in some handheld tasers, fed by a 9V battery. The module claims 400kV, but with a high impedance HV meter the output measured closer to 12kV to 16kV. The voltage multiplier is designed to stay under 10mA for safety, and the small battery limits the whole thing to only a few mA anyway.
The standout moment is flipping the switch: bright blue arcs jump between the wire ends held in the figure's hands, and they pass right through the circular window in the chip so the body glows blue. The maker has even put both hands into the arc and says it felt annoying but nothing worse. One trade-off to note: the arc quits when the battery runs low or the wires get moved too far apart, and the maker switches the device off whenever that happens so the module does not overheat.
Project by Proto G Engineering. Watch it on their YouTube channel: